Making Labor Visible: The One-Sided Correspondence of Sarah Orne Jewett and Abbie S. Beede

While archival materials are an invaluable resource for biographers, gaps in the archive complicate biography research. In this essay, I argue that the study of one-sided correspondence is crucial for nineteenth-century scholars interested in the intersection of labor and book history. Through a case study of Sarah Orne Jewett's letters to a manuscript typist, Abbie S. Beede, I suggest that one-sided correspondence can provide a useful, even if incomplete, site for examining class and labor dynamics in nineteenth-century book production.